A review of A Gentler God

In 1986 Doug Frank published one of the most intriguing books in an outpouring of historical writing on Amer­ican evangelical Protestants. Its title, Less Than Conquerors, inverted a well-known Pauline phrase popular in revival traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Frank's thesis was that as evangelicals entered the 20th century and began to lose the cultural dominance they had once enjoyed in American society, they made a series of disastrous moves. They turned to end-times prophecy and a spirituality of inner "victorious living," abdicating responsible social action; they objectivized sinfulness in external matters like the liquor traffic, trivializing the meaning of evil; and they let simplistic hellfire evangelism dominate church life. All of this badly distorted the gospel. The book's lengthy account of how evangelicals abandoned the true meaning of Christ's cross in exchange for increasingly desperate and self-deluding theologies of power made it an unusual historical exercise.

Frank's new book extends the themes of his earlier volume into a full-scale critique of the post-World War II evangelical Christianity in which he was raised. As he describes it, the neoevangelical discourse publicized by evangelists such as Billy Graham and reprised in myriad local churches features a God who in perfect holiness threatens sinners with eternal punishment unless they repent, accept Christ and go on to lives of squeaky-clean moral probity. This God is both wrathful and loving, avenging and forgiving, demanding and accepting. While Frank obviously retains some affection for those who proclaimed such a message, he now regards it as "self-contradictory"—and even psychologically mur­derous.